Patricia Gottlieb Shapiro

Of the eighteen women I interviewed for the book, only one talked about her legacy. In her case, it related to the fact that she didn’t have children. She felt it was vitally important that her work be significant and lasting, because she would not be making her mark on children or grandchildren.

We all experience losses as we age. Some are in relation to our physical abilities; others concern regrets and mistakes we’ve made. Another sad part of growing older is losing friends and family members to illness and death. In fact, sometimes it seems that so much of aging is about letting go.

I was most surprised by how many women talked spontaneously about their mothers. In most cases, their mothers had passed away and had been dead for some time. Yet these women were still very much a part of their daughters’ lives. They talked about their mothers in two distinct ways: either as a positive role model or as a foil to which they reacted in contrary ways.

I’m sure there are men who do come home, but I haven’t studied them and I don’t think that we can automatically assume that what’s true for women is also true for me. Men and women’s development are very different. To put it in a nutshell, women grow through their relationships and by connecting with others while men grow by separating.

You can come home at any age and I hope that reading the book will inspire women to come home at a younger age. But what interested me were the women who came home in their sixties and seventies. We all know artists who, from the age of five or six, began drawing or painting and always knew that painting or drawing was their path, their passion and their home. And they followed that path their entire life.

These women are fortunate, but I wasn’t so interested in them for the purposes of this book. I was more curious about women who lived a life without intention for years, like most of us do, and then experienced a turning point later in life, which brought them home to their true selves.

It’s the wisdom learned on the journey of life that creates a wise woman. We all come with personal issues, baggage, and engrained patterns. By the time we reach fifty or sixty, some of our ways are working and some are not. What distinguishes a wise woman is her awareness, her resilience and her willingness to look at herself in a fresh way.

Women who search for a way home are either troubled about something, have experienced some kind of a loss or yearning, or have experienced a revelation that changes their view of themselves and their world. These experiences often lead to a turning point, which shifts everything. It is this turning point, which could be a death, illness, divorce, change of place, or a personal self-discovery,  that becomes the catalyst for their journey home. With the understanding they’ve gained from living over half a century guiding them, they reinvent their lives. The women featured in my book are good examples of how women can transform their lives in fundamental ways as they age.

No, I don’t think so. We all age differently. Some people age in a healthy way; others continue with their self-destructive habits into their sixties and seventies. Hopefully, aging brings wisdom with it but that’s not true for everyone. I believe it’s the wisdom of aging in combination with the consciousness and self-awareness of a wise woman that brings them home following a turning point in their lives.